At the small Christian college where my wife teaches, a primary part of the mission statement declares the school’s intent to “develop emerging leaders.” My guess is that many schools, whether Christian or not, would echo that aim of developing leaders in their mission statements. But Beth and I sometimes wonder aloud that if the goal is to develop every Christian student into a leader, where are those who will follow them?
It feels unfitting and self-serving for a pastor (a church leader) to dwell too much on a gripe that a current emphasis on leadership development in both church and secular education may have effects as negative as any “leadership crisis” regarding a lack of leaders. So I will simply focus on the fact that in the call of the first Christians in our text this week, Mark 1:14-20, with parallels in all four Gospels, the operative words used by Jesus were about following rather leading.
The Gospels tell this story in different ways. Matthew and Mark make it a short, abrupt narrative. They suggest that Jesus suddenly approached two pairs of fishermen brothers, told them to follow, and they just got up and went. Luke builds in an explanatory fishing miracle, which would have given them some reason to believe Jesus was worth following. John’s telling seems to pull us in at a point further back in time than the other Gospels introduce the fishermen disciples, suggesting that perhaps there was some prior acquaintance with Jesus that prepared the men for the call that came in this week’s reading.
John’s Gospel (as well as a recent lectionary reading from Acts 19), by showing us that John the Baptist also had disciples, helps reveal for us the fact that master/disciple relationship was a common feature of Jewish religious life in Jesus’ time. Many rabbis, Jewish teachers, gathered disciples and instructed them over a course of time. Again, then, Jesus’ call to Peter and Andrew, James and John was not “out of the blue” in any cultural sense.
However, Jesus’ call to follow Him was different both from much modern education to which I alluded at the beginning here, and from the common practice of rabbinic discipleship in the first century. To begin with the latter, disciples often chose their master, applying to and requesting discipleship from a rabbi, like one might apply to a college today. Jesus, on the other hand, took the initiative to choose His disciples and call them to follow. And, as I’ve already pointed out, Jesus’ primary instruction was to follow Him, rather than to encourage some form of leadership training. Instead of promising to make them rabbis like Himself, He acknowledged and blessed the trade they practiced as commercial fishermen and promised to make them “fishers of people.” Notice that is “fishers” not “leaders.”
As I ruminate on all this, I wonder if this text is not a call to present generations of believers to recognize and return to the primary call to follow Jesus, rather than to pursue leadership quite so ardently. I will hazard expressing the question whether going after leadership passionately is not a form of seeking power in a way that is expressly contrary to the teachings of Jesus.
To all that, I will add that while the Lord’s purpose to make His followers “fishers of people” in this text might be understood as a kind of empowering for leadership, it can be seen in other terms, related to the actual practice of fishing. The line fisherman aims to attract and draw fish in, rather than to coerce. The net fisherman (as it appears the disciples mostly were) is seeking to gather. A process of attractively gathering people together around Jesus seems like something different from seeking status and positions of leadership in society. Or at least so it seems to this fishing pastor.